1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character pattern converting circuit for rendering a character pattern expressed in the form of a dot matrix to processings of vertical/lateral conversion and of inclination, and for delivering the converted pattern.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventionally, in printers for example, character patterns are stored in memories thereof fitted to the form of either vertical writing style or lateral writing style.
Accordingly, two types of character patterns are needed in printing for any of those writing styles. In addition, when any italic character is also printed, a memory is necessary for exclusive use of such italic characters. Thus, such a system is in need of large memory capacity and expensive.
Hereupon, a method is widely employed until now of storing only a character pattern of one kind and converting it to various types of character patterns. There is a method thereamong of converting a character pattern vertically to laterally and vice versa, or of converting it italics by making use of softwares. This method however requires many processing and hence necessitates large-scale programs and a lot of time to be taken for those processings.
Hereupon, to speed up such processings, a method has been proposed, as disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publications No. 55-10647 and 57-136687, wherein vertrical and lateral conversions and conversion to italics are processed respectively with exclusive circuits as hardware for improving processing speeds.
However, those prior methods are adapted to have an exclusive circuit for the vertical and lateral conversion and that for the conversion to italics separately, and hence they can not satisfy both requirements of assuring both functions, vertical/lateral conversion to italics as well as of effecting both processings at a high speed. To effect both conversions with use of the above-described prior techniques, it is also possible to combine such two separate exclusive circuit, which however brings about circuits made large scale and costly.